Queen Mary, University of London Trevor J. Dadson El duque de

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Queen Mary, University of London Trevor J. Dadson El duque de

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Other papers deal with violence in Cervantes’s two theatrical pieces set in Algiers, El trato
de Argel and Los baños de Argel (Ana María Rodríguez Rodríguez), Garcilaso and Altisidora
(Antonio Armisén), the Novelas ejemplares (Pierre Darnis), and the eighteenth-century suite of
engravings of Don Quijote by Charles Antoine Coypel (José Manuel Lucía Megías), while there
are some interesting observations on the reception of Cervantes and Don Quixote in Portugal
(Zulmina Santos and Maria Idalina Resina Rodrigues). The final paper, by Guillermo Serés, is
a fine analysis of the interplay and interrelationships between history, poetry, and painting
in Cervantes. The volume has an excellent introduction by Marín Pina and it has been
handsomely produced by Zaragoza University Press.
Queen Mary, University of London
Trevor J. Dadson
El duque de Lerma. Poder y literatura en el Siglo de Oro. Dirigido por Juan Matos
Caballero, José María Micó Juan, y Jesús Ponce Cárdenas. Pp. 419. Madrid: CEEH. 2011.
ISBN: 978-84-936776-7-1
The result of a conference held in Lerma in January 2010 to celebrate the town’s most famous
inhabitant, this volume should be obligatory reading for anyone even remotely interested in
the Spain of Philip III. The fifteen articles published here (not all of the papers given at the
conference are included in this volume) are of a quality that one rarely finds in collective
volumes; obviously, some shine more than others, but the whole volume has a consistency of
quality and interest that lift it above the norm.
Seven of the contributions deal directly or in part with Góngora’s Panegírico al duque de
Lerma, a poem of seventy-nine stanzas in octava rima which, for reasons that are not clear,
although some contributors advance some interesting hypotheses, the poet left unfinished.
Written some time between 1615 and 1617, it may have been intended for public recitation at
the sumptuous festivities that Lerma organized in his ducal town in October 1617 to celebrate
the translation of the Holy Sacrament to his own foundation, the Collegiate Church of San
Pedro. A number of the other contributions examine aspects of these festivities, which signalled
at the time the height of Lerma’s power and prestige as he persuaded the King, Philip III,
and the heir to the throne (the future Philip IV) to make the journey from Madrid to Lerma
specifically for the occasion. Could there be a more powerful example of the favourite’s hold
over the monarch? A year later, in October 1618, Lerma was forced to retire from court, his
power gone, his influence over. Fortune’s wheel had turned again. In retrospect, we can see
that the festivities in Lerma in 1617 marked the end of the Duke’s twenty years of unlimited
and unrestricted power, but, for those at the time, these must have seemed like one more
example of his munificence and patronage, which had dominated Spanish politics and cultural
life for as long as anyone could remember. The remainder of the essays in this volume
consider aspects of the relationship between power and literature (the subtitle of the volume)
under the Duke of Lerma.
The first two contributions, by Mercedes Blanco and Jesús Ponce Cárdenas, on Góngora’s
Panegírico al duque de Lerma, cannot be over-praised: they are magisterial, and on their own
justify the publication of this volume. Blanco studies Góngora’s panegyric as a heroic poem
very much in the line of its classical counterparts such as those by the late Latin poet Claudian.
A fascinating discussion of the debate in the sixteenth century over the nature of heroic poetry,
with especial reference to Torquato Tasso, leads to an examination of how Góngora set about
the task of writing a heroic poem on someone still very much alive, which thus did not allow
the poet the licence to create and over embellish a heroic past and present, since the facts, the
historical facts, would be as well known to the audience as to the dedicatee. This is where
Claudian’s series of seven panegyrics on Roman Emperors came to Góngora’s aid. The
similarities between his own poem and those of Claudian show clearly that he knew his
models very well and that he set out both to emulate and to modernize them. As Blanco
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HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL, Vol. 13 No. 1, February, 2012
pertinently notes: ‘Además de las analogías que presentaba el argumento de los poemas de
Claudiano con el que iba a ocupar a Góngora, el destino del antiguo vate prefiguraba de modo
halagüeño el que anhelaba, en sus horas de optimismo, el poeta barroco. Claudiano conoció
un ascenso fulgurante: cinco años después de su llegada a Roma y a Milán, residencia de los
emperadores, se alzaba en honor suyo en el Foro de Trajano una estatua de bronce’ (p. 29).
Claudian showed Góngora how to write a panegyric in heroic mode, how to select (and omit)
historical facts, how to make much of little; he took what he needed and ignored that which
he did not: ‘Lo que no quiere o no puede hacer es adoptar hasta el fondo la posición de
humilde reverencia, de afirmación arrebatada, de devoción ferviente, que haría creer en la
virtud sobrehumana de Lerma y en lo justificado del fasto desmedido que lo rodea y que rodea
la corte’ (p. 48).
Blanco’s tour de force is followed by an equally compelling contribution by Jesús Ponce
Cárdenas: ‘Taceat superata vetustas: poesía y oratoria clásicas en el Panegírico al duque de
Lerma’. Following on from Blanco’s references to Claudian’s panegyrics and their centrality in
the conception of Góngora’s poem, Ponce Cárdenas examines in detail the Cordoban poet’s
debt to his classical precursor. Of these the most important is the dispositio of the basilikòs
lógos (or imperial discourse of praise), the rhetorical structure that gives shape to the
panegyric. As he convincingly demonstrates, Góngora was well aware of the works of classical
rhetoricians such as the Greek sophist Menander (third century ad) and his Panegírico al duque
de Lerma is structured along the lines propounded by Menander for poems in praise of the
Emperor. As Ponce Cárdenas observes: ‘Pulsando las aspiraciones y los gustos estéticos de su
época, Góngora trataría de edificar para las letras españolas una «construcción» panegírica
capaz de rivalizar con las más excelsas creaciones del mundo antiguo’ (p. 93).
After two such outstanding essays, it would be difficult for anyone to maintain such a high
standard of analysis and intellectual insight, but the remaining pieces on Góngora’s panegyric
all add to our understanding of the poem and its conception. Particularly rewarding was the
piece by Antonio Carreira, ‘Fuentes históricas del Panegírico al duque de Lerma’, where he
seems to retreat from an earlier position whereby he sustained that the poem could not have
been written before Góngora arrived at court in 1617, as he would not have had access to all
the historical facts that underpin the poem. Now he seems to accept that it was probably
written during the period 1615 and 1617 (as proposed by José Manuel Martos, another
contributor to this volume) and that Góngora could have had access to the basic historical facts
he includes in his poem via various sources in Córdoba. What these were or might have been
is the object of his present contribution. As he reminds us, ‘queda decir algo obvio: el
Panegírico no es un libro de historia [. . .] Si a eso unimos la desigualdad en el trato dado a las
noticias recogidas, llegamos a la conclusión de que Góngora maneja materiales poco seguros,
los selecciona, incluso los expurga, y el resto los amplía o reduce según le conviene’ (p. 122).
Other contributions on Góngora include a discussion of the laudatory sonnets that preceded
the panegyric and thus provided a model of sorts for him (Juan Matas Caballero), an analysis
of the sublime style of the poem (Laura Dolfi), the origins of octava rima and Góngora’s use
of the metre in the Polifemo and the Panegírico (José Manuel Martos and José María Micó),
and an examination of one of Góngora’s last and greatest poems, the Fábula de Píramo y
Tisbe (Antonio Pérez Lasheras). A fascinating, interdisciplinary essay on Baroque representations of power in the portrayal of the Duke of Lerma in Góngora, Rubens, and Pantoja de la
Cruz (María D. Martos Pérez) takes the reader neatly into the second main section of the
volume, studies dedicated to other cultural representations of power and patronage at the court
of Philip III. Sagrario López Poza continues her pioneering work on emblems and emblematic
culture with a fine survey of their use during Lerma’s period as favourite (1598–1618); Germán
Vega García-Luengos concentrates on theatrical performances in Valladolid during the time
that the court was based there (1601–06), though without forgetting the novels and poems that
were also produced there; and Carlos Primo Cano looks at another of Góngora’s laudatory
pieces, this time dedicated to Lerma’s nephew the Count of Lemos, a true Maecenas at court.
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The 1617 festivities at Lerma are the subject of essays by Francis Cerdan (on the sermon
preached by Paravicino at the dedication of the Collegiate Church), María Luisa Lobato
(on Luis Vélez de Guevara’s El Caballero del Sol, which made brilliant use of the theatrical
opportunities provided by Lerma’s palace and extensive gardens alongside the river Arlanza),
and Araceli Guillaume-Alonso (on another of the centrepieces of the festivities, the bull fights).
Sitting somewhat outside of all of these pieces is the study by Isabel Colón Calderón on the
letters of Luisa de Carvajal and their references to Lerma, his family (Bernardo de Sandoval y
Rojas, Cardinal of Toledo), his creatures (Rodrigo Calderón, also a distant relation of Luisa),
and their womenfolk, and in particular the way that these latter helped Luisa in her struggles
in England. Although generally well documented, I noted a surprising lack of reference to some
recent publications (by Anne Cruz and Glyn Redworth).
As already stated, this volume reaches the very highest academic standards, and its
production values are equally high. Throughout, the texts are supported by some wonderful
illustrations, in some cases absolutely necessary (López Poza and Martos Pérez), in others a
welcome addition to the black and white of the printed page. The publishers, CEEH (Centro
de Estudios Europa Hispánica), are to be congratulated in these difficult financial times for
pursuing a policy of quality and refusing to compromise. Their books are a pleasure to own
and read.
Queen Mary, University of London
Trevor J. Dadson
Women in the Prose of María de Zayas. By Eavan O’Brien. Pp. xii + 282. Woodbridge:
Tamesis. 2010. ISBN: 978-1-85566-222-3
María de Zayas has benefited or suffered (depending on your point of view) from being one
of the very few secular women writers in seventeenth-century Spain. This has led to her works,
essentially two collections of short stories and one largely forgotten play, being treated to
infinite and meticulous analysis, usually from a feminist standpoint, to such an extreme extent
in some cases that one wonders what she would make of it all were she to be able to return
and read the large number of (generally partisan) articles dedicated to her works.
This latest addition to the growing bibliography on María de Zayas is welcome for a
number of reasons: first of all, that at this point in time anyone could find anything new or
original to say about women in María de Zayas’s prose works; secondly, that the resultant
work is probably one of the most detailed analyses to date of her prose works; thirdly, that by
and large the author manages to resist going fully down a strident feminist road and is able to
see both the pluses and the minuses of this approach. The result therefore is a book that both
draws the reader into the web of María de Zayas’s texts and opens them up to new vistas.
Especially rewarding is the way that Dr O’Brien shows how the later collection of novellas,
Desengaños amorosos (1647), is a much darker, more violent, altogether more challenging
environment for women than is the first collection, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637).
Whereas here there are some happy endings, in the later collection there are none, only violent
deaths or gruesome (and, generally, unmerited) punishments. In Desengaños amorosos women
are not only the victims of a patriarchal order but also, and this may come as a surprise to
some readers, of their fellow women: sisters, sisters-in-law, friends, rivals, maids, and so on.
María de Zayas does not portray an avant la lettre ‘sisterhood’ of loving, positive women who
stand together against the iniquities of their men folk; rather, she shows how often women are
their own worst enemy to each other, conspiring, for example, with violent men to destroy a
rival in love.
By focusing solely on the female characters in the two collections, O’Brien is able to explore
in great depth all the real and potential relationships that exist among women in these
collections. Of particular interest is the way in which de Zayas uses the technique of the frame
text to introduce each short story. In Novelas amorosas y ejemplares the presenters of the text
or exemplum to be read out and discussed are male and female in equal order; in Desengaños
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The only evidence for the existence of this text is the word of its first editor, Van Praag.
Apart from Van Praag, no one else seems ever to have seen the text and, in spite of his
promise in the introduction to the edited text to provide visual proof of the text’s existence,
he did not. There are too many question marks over this text, too many inconsistencies in the
tale of its discovery, not to consider at least the possibility that it might be a fake, either an
eighteenth-century fake or a twentieth-century one. If, as Van Praag, asserted, manuscripts
from Amsterdam were usually bound in leather, why was this one bound in parchment and
catalogued in, of all languages, French: ‘Manuscrit espagnol, en prose et en vers, du 17 siècle?’?
No explanation is given as to when or how it acquired this ‘new’ French binding. If Van Praag’s
account is true, then presumably this manuscript passed at some point in time into French
hands. When? Who owned it before it miraculously appeared in a book store in Utrecht?
Neither Van Praag nor the text’s modern editor seem to have asked these questions. Somebody
should have. In her enthusiasm at being able to add a new female picaresque novel to the genre,
Zafra seems to have laid aside a cardinal rule of any editor: never accept at face value what
has been written or edited previously; question everything; remain always sceptical.
As far as the actual text is concerned, it is just as well that we have Anne Cruz’s excellent
translation into English to help us, as most readers (English and Spanish) will find the original
heavy going and, in places, very difficult to understand. The annotations to the text (both the
Spanish ‘original’ and the English translation) help enormously and are very instructive.
Indeed, the complexity and difficulty of the text could be a powerful argument in favour of the
novella being what it purports to be, that is, a mid-seventeenth-century picaresque tale about
the life and times of a brothel keeper, one Mother Andrea. One could argue persuasively, I
think, that it would be nigh on impossible for a non-native Spaniard, like Van Praag, to create
a text such as this one with its heavy dependence on thieves’ slang, what Anne Cruz refers to
as ‘the marginalized lexicon of early modern Spain as it appropriates the code of germanía or
thieves’ cant and imbues conventional expressions with satirical, burlesque, and otherwise
forbidden significations’ (p. 25). On the other hand, Van Praag was a distinguished linguist,
and it would not have been impossible (difficult, yes, and very time-consuming) for him to put
together a hybrid or mongrel text based on his reading of other seventeenth-century picaresque
novels. It might well have started out as a game or a challenge to see if he could ‘create’ a
female picaresque novel along the lines of La Lozana andaluza; later, the challenge to himself
became a challenge to his fellow Hispanists, to see if they could spot the fraud.
All of this is speculation, of course, but speculation of the sort that the modern editor should
have engaged in before presenting the innocent reader with a text that appears on the surface
to be completely unproblematic, when that it is certainly not.
Queen Mary, University of London
Trevor J. Dadson
La colección de libros impresos del IV Duque de Uceda en la Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Estudio y catálogo. By Margarita Martín Velasco. Pp. 582. Madrid: Calambur-CEEH-BNE.
2009. ISBN: 978-84-8359-180-2
Anyone who has spent time working with early modern texts in the Biblioteca Nacional de
España in Madrid will quite likely have had the good fortune to find themselves handling a
copy of one of the IV Duke of Uceda’s books or manuscripts, easily recognizable in their green
binding with the coat of arms of the Duke in the centre. Indeed, the BNE holds a large number
printed and manuscript volumes from the Duke’s library; a smaller number are to be found in
the Biblioteca General de Navarra, the Real Colegiata de Roncesvalles, and the Biblioteca
Marqués de Valdecilla of the Universidad Complutense of Madrid.
In this extremely informative and well-researched volume, Margarita Martín Velasco has set
out to track down and catalogue the books that belonged to the IV Duke, Juan Francisco
Pacheco, before and during the time he was Viceroy in Sicily. In 1696 he returned to the
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Peninsula, having sent his vast library on ahead of him. As part of the process, which required
a special authorization from the Inquisition, he had his librarian, Joannes Sylvester, catalogue
the whole collection. This catalogue, which lists some 2076 entries, is dated 1692 and is the
object of study of this current volume.
As well as transcribing Sylvester’s catalogue and identifying all of the entries and, in
particular, locating those copies to be found in the BNE, Martín Velasco also gives us a very
useful short biography of the IV Duke, who spent most of his life in service to the Spanish
monarchy. It was, however, the sudden change of allegiance in the last years of his life, when
he switched loyalties from Philip V to the Archduke Charles III during the War of the Spanish
Succession, that merits most discussion, for the simple reason that it was this change that led
to the sequestration of Uceda’s library and its incorporation into the Royal Library,
from whence it eventually passed into the Biblioteca Nacional. Martín Velasco provides an
interesting account of the Duke’s struggles of conscience in the matter of where his loyalties
lay, especially after he learned of the death in captivity of two of his noble friends: the Duke
of Medinaceli and the Marquis of Leganés, both accused (but never actually tried) of betraying
the cause of Philip V. Once he threw his lot in with the Austrian pretender, he could never
return to the Peninsula or recuperate his estates and possessions there, among them his precious
library. He died in Vienna in 1718.
Although Uceda suffered in exile the consequences of what was seen in Spain as treason, the
one advantage for book lovers is that it meant that his superb library, one of the largest ever
assembled in seventeenth-century Spain, remained intact and not sold at public auction
and dispersed after his death as was the fate of most libraries of the time. Martín Velasco’s
reconstruction of the library as it was in 1692 has provided all those working on private
libraries, book-ownership, and library inventories with an excellent tool for further research.
The first chapter is a useful overview of current studies on readers and book ownership in this
period, with particular emphasis on the various inventories of Uceda’s library; chapters two
and three concern his life and participation in the War of the Spanish Succession; chapter four
examines various contemporary treatises on the organization of a library and their influence
on the criteria chosen by Joannes Sylvester for the organization of the Duke’s library, which
Martín Velasco rightly designates a ‘biblioteca museo’; but the meat of the volume is Part II,
the catalogue of Uceda’s books and the very helpful index of authors that accompanies it.
Interestingly, Martín Velasco found that there are many books that belonged to Uceda now in
the BNE that are not in Sylvester’s catalogue, possibly as many as 40 per cent of those
currently there. She was able to link 895 entries in Sylvester’s list with 1162 actual volumes in
the BNE. This would suggest that either the Duke added to his collection after the inventory
was carried out in 1692 and before he returned to Spain in 1696 (quite likely), and/or that not
all the books he owned at that time were listed by Sylvester (also quite likely).
The production standards of the volume are generally high, with some helpful illustrations;
there are, however, some very annoying errata, such as the date of his death, given as 1781 on
p. 52 (which would have made him 132 years old!), or the lack of footnote 73 on p. 84 (we are
given the actual footnote text but not the number in the main text that it refers to), or the
numerous errors of orthography and punctuation. A book of this quality needed and deserved
better proof reading from all concerned in its production. It remains, however, an important
contribution to the growing field of studies on the history of the book and its author is to be
congratulated on the way she has set about her task in describing and locating the 2076
entries.
Queen Mary, University of London
Trevor J. Dadson